Redeeming the Time: Gospel Perspective on the Challenges of the Hour

By Robert Barron and John L. Allen

The past several years have been a time of tremendous challenge. From the COVID-19 pandemic that afflicted the world, to the political polarization that unsettled the nation, to the division, disaffiliation, and scandal that rocked the Church, Catholics everywhere have been filled with fear, burdened by pain, and longing for hope.

In Redeeming the Time, Bishop Robert Barron follows the wisdom of St. Paul in Ephesians 5 and boldly shines the light of the Gospel into our dark hour. Sorting through our moral, intellectual, social, political, and ecclesial turmoil, this collection of essays is a timely reminder that our hope—especially when things seem hopeless—is always found in Christ and his Church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Word on Fire
• Release date: Jun 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685780593

Robert Barron

Bishop Robert Barron is the bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. 

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Published by Word on Fire, Park Ridge, IL 60068

© 2022 by Word on Fire Catholic Ministries

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved

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by Cassie Pease, Marlene Burrell, and Rozann Lee.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition (copyright © 1989, 1993), used by permission of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

All rights reserved worldwide.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without

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For more information, contact Word on Fire, PO Box 170, Des Plaines, IL 60016

or email [e-mail].

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ISBN: 978-1-685780-05-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021922708

Contents

Foreword

PART 1 – FIGHTING THE SEXUAL ABUSE CRISIS

Tintoretto and the Reform of the Church

The McCarrick Mess

Sowing the Wind and Reaping the Whirlwind:

A Reflection on the Irish Referendum

Letter to a Suffering Church: Conclusion

Part II – REACHING THE NONES

The Least Religious Generation in US History:

A Reflection on Jean Twenge’s iGen

Spinoza, Secularism, and the Challenge of Evangelization

Getting Out of the Sacristy: A Look at Our Pastoral Priorities

Blasting Holes through the Buffered Self

Bill Nye Is Not the Philosophy Guy

Stephen Hawking: Great Scientist, Lousy Theologian

Doctor Strange, Scientism, and the Gnostic Way Station

The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon

Listening to Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris

The USCCB Meeting, Jordan Peterson, and the Nones

What I Learned Talking with Thousands of Skeptics on Reddit

Apologists, Catechists, Theologians: Wake Up!

A New Apologetics: An Intervention at the Youth Synod

Why Accompaniment Involves Apologetics

Black Elk and the Need for Catechists

Go in Haste! Be Amazed! Treasure!

Part III – RESISTING THE CULTURE OF CONTEMPT

Social Media and the Culture of Contempt

The Internet and Satan’s Game

Pride, Humility, and Social Media

Thomas Aquinas and the Art of Making a Public Argument

Kathy Griffin and the Vanishing of Argument

Violence against Christians and the Waning of Reason

Love an Enemy This Lent

Part IV – CONFRONTING MORAL CHAOS

The Crown and the Fundamental Values of a Society

Paul Tillich and The Shape of Water

Breaking Out of the Prison of Self-Invention

The Doritos Commercial and the Revival of Voluntarism

Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Distinction

between Fact and Fiction

Paul VI, Prophet

Porn and the Curse of Total Sexual Freedom

Michelle Wolf and the Throwaway Culture

Seeing Abortion

New York, Abortion, and a Short Route to Chaos

Love Is Both Tolerant and Intolerant

Why We Can’t Do Evil Even If Good May Come

Part V – DEFINING SOCIAL JUSTICE

Charlottesville and America’s Original Sin

Pentecost and the Fires in Our Cities

Martin Luther King Jr.and the Religious Motivation for Social Change

Acknowledging an Abyss, Finding a Bridge

We’re All Becoming Platonists Now—and That’s Not Good

Canceling Padre Serra

How the Star Wars Franchise Lost Its Way

Wokeism in France: The Chickens Coming Home to Roost

Daniel Berrigan and Nonviolence

The Surprising Message of Downsizing

Talking to Some Young Jesuits about Social Justice and Evangelization

Peter Claver vs. Immanuel Kant

Dominion, the Values of the West, and the Cross of Christ

Stretching Out to Great Things: A Commencement Address

for the University of St. Thomas

Part VI – NAVIGATING POLITICAL POLARIZATION

Four Principles for Catholics during Election Season

Governor Cuomo and God’s Noncompetitive Transcendence

A Talk on the Hill

One Cheer for George Will’s The Conservative Sensibility

It’s Time for Catholics (and All Religious People) to Wake Up:

The Real Danger Posed by the California Confession Bill

Why We Need a Distribution of Power

Culture Warrior and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

Part VII – FACING COVID-19 AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Miracles from Heaven and the Problem of Theodicy

Pain Is Not Metaphysically Basic

Tragedy, Contingency, and a Deeper Sense of God

Should Suffering Shake Our Faith?

The Coronavirus and Sitting Quietly in a Room Alone

The Quarantine’s Three Lessons about the Church

The Book of Exodus and Why Coming Back to Mass Matters

Come Back to Mass!

Part VIII – SHINING THE LIGHT OF THE NATIONS

Pope Francis and the Evangelicals

Laudato Si’ Athwart Modernity

Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, and the Universal Destination of Goods

Why What Are the Bishops Doing about It? Is the Wrong Question

What Is Synodality?

The Ratzingerian Constants and the Maintenance

of Harmony in the Church

A Case for Priestly Celibacy

The Question Behind the Question

The Benedict Option and the Identity-Relevance Dilemma

St. John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman in Full

Cardinal Etchegaray, Henri de Lubac, and Vatican II

The Evangelical Path of Word on Fire

The Word on Fire Retreat and God’s Wonderful Providence

Evangelizing through the Good

Tolkien, Chesterton, and the Adventure of Mission

Confirmation and Evangelization

Paul on the Areopagus: A Masterclass in Evangelization

Foreword

With regard to current events, the perennial temptation of Christianity is to become either too vertical or too horizontal. That is, we end up either so obsessed with otherworldly contemplation as to be completely detached from what’s happening just outside the doors of the chapel, or so invested in a social or political program as to all but ignore the spiritual dimension of human existence and destiny. The more subtle form of the same temptation, probably, is to think the solution is a neat mathematical 50/50 split, with half one’s time devoted to the here and now and the other half to the life beyond.

Naturally, the proper Catholic answer is something different entirely—it’s both/and. The aim is a life utterly tied up in the hurly and burly of the day, and, at the same time, totally permeated by the transcendent. Put simply, the trick is to be completely horizontal and completely vertical at the same time.

In recent Catholic life, the best example was St. John Paul II, the would-be Carmelite mystic whose entire life radiated spiritual depth, but who was also at least as well-informed and engaged in the nitty-gritty of geopolitics and the movements of history as most secular politicians and diplomats of his era. In today’s America, the best public example we have of that capacity to fully incarnate the horizontal and the vertical is probably Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron of Los Angeles, founder of Word on Fire, as this collection of essays abundantly illustrates.

Certainly no one could accuse Barron of paying short shrift to the spiritual. His best-known works aren’t commentaries on current affairs but artful expositions of the perennial faith of the Catholic Church, crafted by someone who’s clearly drenched in belief. While Catholicism has many fine evangelists, however, Barron’s particular gift is to make the Church’s timeless tradition nevertheless seem timely by addressing it to the peculiar zigs and zags of the postmodern era, from our quasi-Jansenist fundamentalism about science to our toxic addiction to snark.

At one point Barron evokes St. John Henry Newman to the effect that the Church moves through a culture like a foraging animal in a forest, taking advantage of what it can and fighting off what it must. This book captures Barron at both his foraging and his fighting best.

I’ve always known that Bishop Robert Barron is a keen consumer of journalism, and that he appreciates the pressures journalists face in compiling the first draft of history; the Fellowship I hold at the Word on Fire Institute devoted to St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of journalists, is one proof of the point. Unlike many religious figures one meets in this line of work, Barron doesn’t expect journalists to be the fifth evangelist instead of the fourth estate; he understands that journalism is a different animal, with its own logic and principles of tradecraft, and he wants it to be probing, critical, and unbeholden to other agendas. When he’s critical of the journalistic enterprise, it’s because he wants us to do better journalism, not to be spokespersons for the system or advocates for some other cause.

I make my living covering the Vatican, and, over the years, I’ve had more conversations than I can count with bishops about whatever the latest madness unfolding in or around the Eternal City happens to be. I can testify that I’ve rarely been asked smarter questions than those I’ve taken from Barron, and it’s because he’s got the heart of a priest and the mind of a professor, but also the savvy of a good beat reporter. (To this day, a question he once asked about papal elections haunts me because I still don’t have a good answer to it, but that’s for another time.)

What I hadn’t realized until reading this collection of essays, however, is that Barron is actually a fellow member of the tribe, a journo flying below radar. He’s so well known for his video projects, his homilies, his lectures and speeches, that it’s easy to miss the fact that he’s also an old-school newspaper columnist, a sort of Walter Winchell in a mitre and cassock. Had most of these essays been printed on the op-ed page of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, they would have been right at home—and, frankly, the level of our civic discourse in America would be much higher if they were.

Strictly as an essayist—the word for which in my professional neighbor­hood is columnist—Barron exhibits three towering strengths, all abundantly illustrated in this collection.

First, Barron writes with real intelligence. His piece on the fiasco sur­rounding ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, now also ex-priest, begins with a reference to Luca Signorelli’s image of the Antichrist in the Orvieto Cathedral and veers quickly into exegesis of René Girard, with no apologies for the eggheaded discursions. He’s also in the habit of dropping words such as evanesce and deracinate into sentences, with no sense of artifice. Barron assumes his reader is smart enough to handle high-level content and makes no effort, like so many contemporary columnists, to dumb things down or to smother an absence of insight with clichés and one-liners.

I mean, no one who ends columns with quirky slogans such as Down with Kantian reductionism! is really appealing to the lowest common denominator, is he?

Second, Barron takes a stand. There’s never any mistaking which side of an argument he’s on; just read his essay on Bill Nye the Science Guy’s views on philosophy, for example, and you won’t come away muddled about what Barron thinks. (I’m too old to have watched Nye’s 1990s-era program, which was pitched at the youth of the day, but I share Barron’s skepticism that hosting a TV kids show necessarily qualifies someone to make pronouncements on metaphysics.)

Yet while Barron can be critical, even caustic, he’s never mean. In fact, he’s emerged as the great opponent of twenty-first-century Catholic snark, especially on social media. A whole section of this collection is devoted to calling out what Barron calls a culture of contempt online, which is hardly just a Catholic problem, but which Catholics arguably have a higher calling to resist. Carefully ponder his diagnosis of social media comboxes in the essay on The Internet and Satan’s Game, and you’ll never again be confused about the difference between argument (good) and calumny (bad).

Third, Barron is just a flat-out good writer. Consider, for instance, the way he wraps up an essay on the movie The Shape of Water, in which Barron makes the argument that the film exalts freedom and individualism at the expense of structure and participation in something larger than the self: If all we have is the shape of water—which is to say, no shape at all, Barron writes, we’re actually in bad shape. (Fair warning: someday, I will find a context to steal that line.)

In the essay in this volume on misuse of the term culture warrior, which he considers a good example of treating an abstraction as if it’s a real thing, Barron suggests following Bernard Lonergan’s epistemic imperatives:

• Be attentive (see what is really there to be seen).

• Be intelligent (form plausible hypotheses to explain a given phenomenon).

• Be reasonable (make judgments so as to determine which

of a variety of bright ideas is in fact the right idea).

• Be responsible (accept the full implications of the judgment made).

You’ll find no better example of a spry Catholic mind trying to put those principles to work than the essays collected here. As we say in Italian, Buona lettura!

John L. Allen Jr.

Part 1  

FIGHTING THE

SEXUAL ABUSE CRISIS

Tintoretto and the

Reform of the Church

At the close of a long session of walking and musing in the National Gallery of Art, I was drawn by an empty and comfortable-looking couch situated at the end of one of the galleries. Plopping down to rest, I looked up at the picture right in front of me. At first glance, given the color scheme and the peculiar modeling of the figures, I thought it was an El Greco, but closer examination revealed that it in fact was Tintoretto’s depiction of Christ at the Sea of Galilee. The drama at the center of the composition is the Apostles’ boat, buffeted by choppy waves, and St. Peter taking a gingerly, tentative step onto the bounding main at the invitation of the Lord, who beckons to him. My seated posture conduced toward contemplation, and I spent a good deal of time with this painting, first admiring the obvious technical skill of the painter, especially in the rendering of the water, but eventually moving to a deeper perception of its spiritual theme, of particular resonance today.

Whenever the Gospels present the disciples of Jesus in a boat, they are, of course, symbolically representing the Church. So Tintoretto is showing the Church in its practically permanent condition across the ages: at sea, rocked by waves, in danger of going under. Indeed, with a handful of remarkable exceptions, every age has been, in some way, a perilous one for the Mystical Body of Christ. The boat is filled with the specially chosen Apostles of the Lord, those who spent years with the Master, learning his mind, watching his moves, witnessing his miracles with their own eyes, taking in his spirit. One would think that even if everyone else failed to follow the Lord, these men would hold steady. And yet we see them cowering, timorous, obviously at a loss as the storm rages around them. And the Gospels, in a manner that sets them apart from most other literature dealing with religious founders and their disciples, do consistently portray Jesus’ inner circle as deeply flawed. Peter denied the Lord at the moment of truth; James and John succumbed to petty ambition; Thomas refused to believe the report of the Resurrection; Judas betrayed his master; all of them, with the exception of John, abandoned him on the cross, protecting their own hides. And yet Tintoretto shows Peter tentatively placing his foot upon the sea, commencing to walk toward Jesus. The great spiritual lesson—shopworn perhaps to the point of being a cliché, but still worth repeating—is that as long as the Church keeps its eyes fixed on Christ, it can survive even the worst of storms. It can walk on the water.

The Catholic Church is once more enduring a moment of extreme trial in regard to sexual abuse. This time, the focus of attention is on the failure of some bishops to protect the vulnerable, and in at least one terrible case, the active abuse perpetrated by a cardinal archbishop. The whole world is rightly outraged by these sins, and the Church appropriately feels ashamed. Many wonder, understandably, how those specially devoted to Christ could fall into such depravity. But then we recall that every bishop today is a successor of the Apostles—which is to say, of that band that both sat in easy familiarity with Jesus and denied, betrayed, and ran from their Master. In stormy times, the first Apostles cowered, and their successors, we have to admit, often do the same.

But there are grounds for hope. They are found, however, not in institutional reform (as important as that is), not in psychological analysis (as indispensable as that might be), not in new programs and protocols (as helpful as they might prove), but rather in a return to Jesus Christ. Eyes fixed on him, hearts attuned to him, minds beguiled by him, action determined by him, the leaders of the Church can, even now, walk on the water.

Tintoretto sheds considerable light on this issue of apostolic weakness and strength in the very manner in which he has arranged the figures in his composition. The painting is foreshortened in such a way that the disciples appear very small, almost doll-like, whereas Jesus, looming in the extreme foreground, looks gigantic. As John the Baptist put the principle: He must increase, but I must decrease (John 3:30). When our anxieties and egos are placed in the foreground, Christ necessarily recedes. Crucial to the reformation of the Church is the reversal of that perspective.

The McCarrick Mess

This article was released on August 9, 2018. That October, the Holy See announced an investigation into Theodore McCarrick’s abuse, culminating in a report released in November 2020.

When I was going through school, the devil was presented to us as a myth, a literary device, a symbolic manner of signaling the presence of evil in the world. I will admit to internalizing this view and largely losing my sense of the devil as a real spiritual person. What shook my agnosticism in regard to the evil one was the clerical sex abuse scandal of the nineties and the early aughts. I say this because that awful crisis just seemed too thought-through, too well-coordinated, to be simply the result of chance or wicked human choice. The devil is characterized as the enemy of the human race and particularly the enemy of the Church. I challenge anyone to come up with a more devastatingly effective strategy for attacking the Mystical Body of Christ than the abuse of children and young people by priests. This sin had countless direct victims of course, but it also crippled the Church financially, undercut vocations, caused people to lose confidence in Christianity, dramatically compromised attempts at evangelization, etc., etc. It was a diabolical masterpiece.

Sometime in the early aughts, I was attending a conference and found myself wandering more or less alone in the area where groups and organizations had their booths. I came over to one of the tables and the woman there said, You’re Fr. Barron, aren’t you? I replied affirmatively, and she continued, You’re doing good work for the Church, but this means that the devil wants to stop you. And you know, he’s a lot smarter than you are and a lot more powerful. I think I just mumbled something to her at that moment, but she was right, and I knew it. All of this has come back to me in the wake of the McCarrick catastrophe. St. Paul warned us that we battle not against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities. Consequently, the principal work of the Church at this devastating moment ought to be prayer, the conscious and insistent invoking of Christ and the saints.

Now, I can hear people saying, So Bishop Barron is blaming it all on the devil. Not at all. The devil works through temptation, suggestion, and insinuation—and he accomplishes nothing without our cooperation. If you want to see the principle illustrated, Google Luca Signorelli’s image of the Antichrist in the Orvieto Cathedral. You’ll see what I mean. McCarrick did wicked things, and so did those, it appears, who enabled him. And we have to come to terms with these sins.

Before I broach the subject of how to do this, permit me to say a few words about unhelpful strategies being bandied about. A first one is indiscriminate scapegoating. The great philosopher René Girard taught us that when communities enter into crisis, people typically commence desperately to cast about for someone or some group to blame. In the catharsis of this indiscriminate accusation, they find a kind of release, an ersatz peace. All the bishops should resign! The priesthood is a cesspool of immorality! The seminaries are all corrupt! As I say, these assertions might be emotionally satisfying at some level, but they are deeply unjust and conduce toward greater and not less dysfunction. The second negative strategy is the riding of ideological hobby horses. So lots of commentators—left, center, and right—have chimed in to say that the real cause of the McCarrick disaster is, take your pick, the ignoring of Humanae Vitae, priestly celibacy, rampant homosexuality in the Church, the mistreatment of homosexuals, the sexual revolution, etc. Mind you, I’m not saying for a moment that these aren’t important considerations and that some of the suggestions might not have real merit. But I am saying that launching into a consideration of these matters that we have been debating for decades and that will certainly not admit of an easy adjudication amounts right now to a distraction.

So what should be done? The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has no juridical or canonical authority to discipline bishops. And even if it tried to launch an investigation, it has, at the moment, very little credibility. Only the pope has juridical and disciplinary powers in regard to bishops. Hence, I would suggest (as a lowly back-bencher auxiliary) that the bishops of the United States—all of us—petition the Holy Father to form a team, made up mostly of faithful lay Catholics skilled in forensic investigation, and to empower them to have access to all of the relevant documentation and financial records. Their task should be to determine how McCarrick managed, despite his widespread reputation for iniquity, to rise through the ranks of the hierarchy and to continue, in his retirement years, to function as a roving ambassador for the Church and to have a disproportionate influence on the appointment of bishops. They should ask the ecclesial version of Sen. Howard Baker’s famous questions: What did the responsible parties know and when did they know it? Only after these matters are settled will we know what the next steps ought to be.

In the meantime, and above all, we should ask the heavenly powers to fight with us and for us. I might suggest especially calling upon the one who crushes the head of the serpent.

Sowing the Wind and Reaping

the Whirlwind:

A Reflection on the Irish Referendum

I will confess that as a person of Irish heritage on both sides of my family, I found the events in Ireland in May 2018 particularly dispiriting. Not only did the nation vote, by a two-to-one margin, for the legal prerogative to kill their children in the womb, but they also welcomed and celebrated the vote with a frankly sickening note of gleeful triumph. Will I ever forget the unnerving looks and sounds of the frenzied crowd gathered to cheer their victory in the courtyard of Dublin Castle? As the right to abortion now sweeps thoroughly across the Western world, I am put in mind of Gloria Steinem’s mocking remark from many years ago to the effect that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. I say this because abortion has indeed become a sacrament for radical feminism, the one absolutely sacred, nonnegotiable value for so-called progressive women.

One of the features of the lead-up to the vote—and this has become absolutely commonplace—was the almost total lack of moral argument on the part of the advocates of abortion. There was a lot of political talk about rights, though the rights of the unborn were never mentioned; and there were appeals to health care, though the lethal threat to the health of the child in the womb was a nonissue. There was, above all, an attempt to manipulate people’s feelings by bringing up rare and extreme cases. But what one hardly ever heard was a real engagement of the moral argument that a direct attack on a human life is intrinsically evil and as such can never be permitted or legally sanctioned.

Accompanying the entire process, of course, was the subtext of the Catholic Church’s cultural impotence, even irrelevance. Every single story that I read in advance of the vote and subsequent to it mentioned the fact that overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland had shaken off the baleful influence of the Church and had moved, finally, into the modern world. How sad, of course, that being up-to-date